Project Brief

Creative consultancy for the ecommerce Republic of Mode. To create visuals and develop a signature aesthetic for the brand by conceptualising a unique look through images and language. Building and producing all content for the client’s social media, making sure that it is one of a kind and aligns with their brand identity perfectly.

Client

Credits

Styling Credits

It is a routine day of emails and photo editing. The only exceptional occurence is the lightning outside in all it’s Goan-monsoon-batshit-crazy-glory. I open my laptop, start working my inbox to have the zero unread emails declaration. (It is a daily personal goal and a bit of an obsession.)

This may sound like a generic email, one of several hundred which may graze our inboxes. As creators we are immune to the dialect used by agencies, advertising companies and brands. Being regularly bombarded with the term ‘content creation,’ partly due to the lack of a better term thereof and partly due to it being one of the current buzzwords so to speak; portrays a significant shift in not only how the requirement and parameters for creating this so-called ‘content’ have drastically changed but also in how people often value or devalue the worth of the work produced under it’s context.

Calling something content in this day and age, in reference to what it means with the birth of social media, has reduced manifold times the value of creating something beautiful and significant to simply having enough material and more to fill up scrollable grids and clickbait lists.

See, when one focuses on creating ‘content’ that’s all one ends up creating. An article by BitTorrent which echoed my feelings about this matter years ago, rightly said something to this effect, “When you walk out of the best movie you have ever seen in your life, something that has tugged on your heart strings and stirred feelings within, you would never be the one to describe the experience as having consumed the best content of your life.”

Because it wasn’t. It was more.

Content, to me, brings with it it’s baggage of a marketing ploy, a subtle product placement or a nudge to redirect, buy, like, want; all created in a matter of seconds with a trusty iphone and a limited vision —often aping the popular visual language of the time, a flat-lay here, a pretty floor there, flowers galore; never straying away from the tried and tested. However, creating something significant, in my opinion, cannot be approached as creating content. It is usually something that will require you to pour your heart and parts of your soul into the creation.

Having said that, nobody detests the idea of a starving artist more that me. An image which confines a human to doing just ‘one thing’ and consequently being unable to grasp the value of developing other skill sets to sell said ‘one thing.’ Although the romanticism it brings is endearing and on several occasions madly inspiring. So this is not a plea to go back to that time, it did freelancers or ‘the unemployed’ no good. This is a petition to bring about a change, perhaps, in the terminology which directly represents this time we are living and creating in; a change in the perception of clients, creators, as well as mass consumers, to look inwards while creating and consuming.

Recent work

Rhea Gupte is a visual artist, photographer, creative director, writer and consultant based in Goa, India. This space serves as her portfolio showcasing her body of commissioned projects, self-initiated endeavours and reflective essays and poetry.